


Why Schrodinger Really Put His Cat in a Box

by karrenia_rune



Category: The Middleman (TV)
Genre: Action, Gen, Humor, challenge: genretwisting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-12
Updated: 2011-05-12
Packaged: 2017-10-19 08:02:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/198674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karrenia_rune/pseuds/karrenia_rune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would appear that Wendy and her roommate Lacey just might find themselves the new owners of a talking and rather out-spoken feline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why Schrodinger Really Put His Cat in a Box

Title: Why Schrodinger Really Put His Cat in a Box  
Author: karrenia_rune  
Rating: Family-Friendly  
Fandom: The Middleman(tv)  
Genre:children's fic  
Characters/Pairings:Wendy Watson, the Middleman, mention: Lacey Thornfield, OC: cat from outerspace, Rufus Ishamel the 3rd. Author's Note: Inspired in part by an old Disney movie from the late 80's, the Cat from Outerspace." Rufus is my own spin on it. Word Count:1264

Disclaimer: The Middleman is an American television series. The series, which was developed for television by Javier Grillo-Marxuach for ABC Family, is based on the Viper Comics series, The Middleman, created by Grillo-Marxuach and Les McClaine. The series ran for one season in 2008.

 

"Why Schrodinger Really Put His Cat in a Box" by karrenia

The scorched dirt around the impact point was far too regular and surprisingly concentrated to have been an accident. There was clearly intelligence at work behind it, but Wendy Watson, if pressed, would be at a loss to explain it.

Her boss more times than she could count using the digits of both her fingers and toes must have been a Boy Scout in a past life, for he was almost always prepared for any eventuality; had a shovel on hand. And in due course, they managed to dig out a black box from underneath the dirt and rubble, and they brought it back for further analysis.

Once they had it pried open they discovered a pair of wide and intense green eyes stared back at them. The owner of those green eyes leapt out of its box, sat up on its haunches and began to groom its fur. Yes, fur, for it was a feline. “Okay, that I did not expect,” remarked Wendy.  
“Indeed, Dubby,” replied the Middle Man. “If it swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, and smells like a duck…”  
“Then is stands to reason that it must be a duck,” she interrupted.

“Pardon me,” remarked the cat and then it blinked, before it added. “I am remiss in my manners. Allow me to introduce myself, I am Rufus Ishamel the 3rd, you can call me Rufus for short.”

Wendy startled. “You can talk!”

“Of course I can talk. What a silly lot of superstition is owned by you bipeds? Do you wonder why it took us so long to determine on whether the time had ripened to make contact with your species?”

“That has a vaguely snide over town, Mr. Rufus,” remarked the Middle Man. “All that aside, then it would imply that your own origins are not terrestrial in nature.”

Wendy shook her head; she was not a hundred percent certain given some amount of fuzziness and a time delay between what the cat said and her own responses; but she had the distinct impression that its speech had been almost directly imprinted on her brain. She concentrated and realized that the feline wore a gold collar with a blinking green gem in its center.

“You must be here for a reason,” Wendy said, snatching the fragments of logic begun by her boss and stretching them out even further to see where they would lead. .

“Indeed, my space craft was damaged in the landing, but not beyond repair, and I am search of a rare element, Org 12. I require your assistance to help me located "Org 12" so that his craft may rendezvous with my mother ship.”

“Might I ask in what region of you space you come from?” For his part the Middle Man did not seem at all surprised by a talking cat, in or what Wendy now suspected, a telepathic alien cat.

In fact, the longer they dealt with this particular feline the more she wondered if it really was a feline in the sense that it might have perhaps taken on the form of a feline to interact with human beings.

She shoved that particular line of thinking to a back corner of her mind figuring that it would best to assume that it was a feline and deal with accordingly.

She had owned more than several felines in her time and she was now living with her friend Lacey Thornfield, a performance artist in the slightly illegal sub-let basement apartment. Well, let’s just say there were cat people and there were dog people; the two were not meant to mix.

“Rufus, we’re going to need a little more to go own than a name of this element that you’re looking for. Is it heavy or light?”

Rufus nodded. “Ah yes, I believe you have a table of elements that lists metals by their atomic weight, Org 12 weighs in at 196.967.”

“Gold, you need gold! Wendy exclaimed.

“Yes,” replied Rufus. “Is this going to be a problem?”

“Not at all,” replied the Middle Man. “Well, old bean, I believe we can assist you after all.”  
**  
Somehow Wendy should have known that it would not be as simple or as streamlined a proposition as simply melting down some 24k gold jewelry; no, the amount of gold required meant contemplating into breaking into a bank vault, and while she could afford a sigh of relief because the vault in question was not the largest deposit of gold in the country; it was still a vault.

Wendy had been outfitted with back pack complete with shoulder straps and a pouch in which Rufus had comfortably snuggled inside, his front paws resting on her shoulders. She was clad in a black jumpsuit and the hole drilled into the roof of building at this point was the only means of ingress.

She also wore an earring that doubled as a communication device; the Middle Man wore an identical one as well. He also was the one lowering inch by agonizing inch into the aforementioned hole.

She landed on the floor of the vault, telling herself that she had a mission to complete and not to allow herself to be distracted by bright shiny things that surrounded her.

“We’re in,” Wendy reported via the audio pickup in her communication device.

“Copy that,” replied the Middle Man.

At that very moment, while she was occupied Rufus had jumped out of her backpack and began to scout around, but not before he set his whiskers in order, than acting very much as the cat he resembled he sniffed around at the stacked gold ingots. If Wendy had not already known better that Rufus was much more than a more household pet and not even from Earth she might have thought he was searching for a scent.

As it was, just prior to going into the mission, he had explained something about how a fellow scout had once crash-landed on Earth decades ago and been placed into a thought experiment, in order to proof or disproof as the case may be, a time paradox, by an Austrian physicist named Edwin Schrodinger.  
The thought experiment presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random even sample.

Someone once attempted the experiment himself, but cannot understand the mechanics of it, He did wonder if it implies that he will kill the cat just by looking at it).t. In the course of developing this experiment, he coined the term Verschränkung (entanglement).  
**

“Verchrankung, the German word for entanglement,” Wendy sighed and looked around, hoping against hope that they had all managed to avoid tripping any alarms and security devices. If they managed to pull of this caper, get out with the gold ingots and get, and still alerted the security guards to their activities, having to talk their way past this, and avoid the subject of their unauthorized presence in the vault; they really would find themselves in an entanglement.

They began to collect the ingots and were well on the way to about half a dozen when Wendy realized that Rufus was not picking them up in his paws but levitating them with his mind.

Aloud she remarked, mostly to herself,” Well, that’s something you don’t see every day. You got more than a few tricks up your sleeve, Mr. Cat, or my name isn’t Wendy Watson.”

“Quite observant Miss Watson; read into this next remark in whatever way you wish,” the cat sighed and furrowed its furry brow,” before he added. “There may be hope for your species yet.”

**Author's Note:**

> Also posted for the dreamwidth 2011 Multifandom Genre Twisting Challenge, with hints to from the late 80's movie the Cat from Outerspace. The theme was children's fic, so I hope it came out that way. Schrodinger's cat was a reference to the 1935 thought experiment done by an Austrian scientist.


End file.
